Adelson, China, and the Times

The New York Times news article on Las Vegas Sands, the company led by Sheldon Adelson, and its dealings in China carries the names of the following Times reporters and "researchers":

Michael Luo

Neil Gough

Edward Wong

Keith Bradsher

Louise Story

Mia Li

Sue-Lin Wong

Xu Yan

Kitty Bennett

Which is nine of them.

The Times article concedes that the "broad outlines" of the story were carried last week by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's article carries the names of

Alexandra Berzon

Kate O'Keeffe

Yang Jie

Tamara Audi

Justin Scheck

Kersten Zhang

Jeremy Page

James V. Grimaldi

Which is eight journalists.

My view of it is that if you put eight or nine New York Times or Wall Street Journal journalists on the case of looking into any big American company operating in China, they could probably come up with something to justify a self-fulfilling headline like the Times', which says that a businessman is a "focus of inquiries." If the Times had nine reporters working on an article about Mother Teresa, she'd be the "focus of inquiries."

Look, maybe the Obama Justice Department and SEC had nothing to do with providing any of the information that appeared in either the Times or the Journal account. Certainly the mere fact that a person is a politically active donor shouldn't make a person immune from government scrutiny, any more than it should make someone a target for such scrutiny. But both papers sure are making a show of devoting a lot of human resources to the story without providing much context about how usual or unusual the reported behavior was by Chinese standards, or by the standards of American firms that do business in China.So far as I can figure it out, the articles center on a guy who was paid $30,000 a month to do government-relations work for Sands in China and was then let go. Plenty of Americans with connections make that kind of money for government relations work in Washington. It's not pretty, but it's not clear why anyone would expect China to operate more immaculately than Washington does.